ATLANTIC BEACH, Fla. – Gail Lee sells jewelry for a living, she doesn't buy it. So when a customer came into her store recently offering to sell her $20,000 worth of gold for half that price, she figured the deal was too good to be true.
"I never held so much gold," said Lee, of Gail's Boutique. "I knew something was wrong, but then when I saw all his gold teeth, I thought, 'Well, maybe he really has real gold."
So Lee called her husband to stall the man while a friend called police.
"I called him and said, 'Honey, there's a man here who's selling gold, and I'd like to buy it. It's a good investment. Would you go to the bank and get $10,000?'" Lee said. "And my husband flipped, and he said, 'What are you doing?'"
What she did was the right thing. According to a police report, the man said he was doing business as a private citizen, similar to a pawn transaction, then advised that he had a "peddler's license."
Police took pictures of the jewelry, which looked like gold, but in the report, the officer says, "I did not believe the jewelry had the weight and appearance of 14K gold."
Atlantic Beach police said they haven't seen this type of scam before. They said the man had one bag of gold that was real, but another that was fake. They believe he would have switched the bags after the sale.
"With gold prices going so high, we have a lot of cash for gold places popping up around the county and, I'm sure, throughout the state," said Tiffany Layson, of the Atlantic Beach Police Department. "So I think it's an opportunity with people with ill intent to take advantage of small business owners."
"People out there, please be aware, small businesses, because it's bad," Lee said. "We're trying to make a living, we're small people and they want to take from us, and it's really sad, and I just don't want them to hit somebody else."